Clinton plans to reassert herself

In the first six months of the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought her star power to the world stage and cemented her position as a serious internal player. Now, according to her aides, she is ready to articulate her own policy agenda, one that focuses in part on strengthening Americans’ capacity for what has been called “smart power.”

The speech she is scheduled to give Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations is expected to serve as an explanation and framework of the administration’s foreign policy and a tour of its busy first half-year. But it will sound some themes closely associated with Clinton’s former life as first lady and U.S. senator.

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“She is bringing the concept of ‘it takes a village’ to foreign policy,” said Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott, invoking the title of a well-received book that Clinton wrote while her husband was in the White House.

“She thought it was a good time to try to give a framing speech to take some perspective, talk about what we have been doing, what we plan to do – the administration and her as secretary – and how these issues fit together as part of a larger strategy,” said an administration official familiar with the draft speech, who said it would tour a breakneck half-year’s diplomatic efforts everywhere from Iran to North Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, and the Middle East.

“It’s an opportunity to take a step back and talk about how this all fits together,” the official said.

The speech will include “strong discussion of development and a forward-looking overview of how we think about U.S. relations with [and] management of the great powers in a way that gets more comprehensive than what they are doing on this or that crisis,” said another Democratic foreign policy official.

One official said the speech has been long in the making and has been labored over by Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter — a former academic who has emerged as a key Clinton policy adviser — along with speechwriter Lissa Muscatine.

But another official suggested an additional motivation: Beating back a persistent perception that Clinton has been kept in the administration’s shadows. Tina Brown wrote on The Daily Beast on Monday that President Barack Obama had confined Clinton to a kind of “wifehood of the Saudi variety” and that it is “time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.”

Officials at the White House and State Department reject the notion that Clinton has been marginalized — and note that much of the low profile is of Clinton’s choosing. She has made, for instance, just one appearance on a Sunday morning talk show — and none until last month — but they insist that’s an absence as much of her choosing as of the White House’s. The White House press office sought to book her on Sunday shows three times before, an official said, but she declined each time, twice because she was overseas and once because she was in New York for Mother’s Day.

Her visibility was also affected by a broken elbow, which required surgery and extensive physical therapy, and prevented her from accompanying Obama on his most recent foreign trip.

Having established herself within the administration and on the world stage, the logical next step for Clinton is to turn her attention to a domestic audience and explain a foreign policy different in tone and substance from George W. Bush’s administration, according to Clinton watchers such as James Goldgeier, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

“She is so good at explaining things that I would hope that at least part of what she’s doing is explaining to the American people why the administration has the policies that it has,” said Goldgeier.

Clinton appears increasingly comfortable expressing her views. State Department officials have suggested that she’s been a hawkish internal voice, pushing Obama toward more confrontational stances toward adversaries from Iran to Cuba. And she has shown a new willingness in recent days to throw the occasional mild elbow in public — even one directed at the White House.